


home is where you

by fascinationex



Series: bleach works by fascinationex [11]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Neighbors, It's mostly Nnoitra and Tesla, M/M, Nnoitra POV, there's no plot!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-06 21:15:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14065725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: Nnoitra moves into a new apartment. Tesla’s his neighbour. Nnoitra’s crush is fierce, immediate andstupid.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains the kind of OOC you get when you turn bloodthirsty undead cannibal monsters into humans but I'm not sure if it's significant enough really to tag it.

Nnoitra moves in because the apartment is going cheap – the agent says three fifty and backs down to three hundred within a week, apparently desperate to get someone in there to stay out the lease.

He expects it to be more of a dump, honestly. Sure, the smoke detector is dead and the plumbing is shrieky, the water is either boiling or freezing with no in between and tastes like copper. The window doesn’t lock. There are cracks in the plaster. The floors creak at odd times and the door jams sometimes.

But it’s not  _bad_. It’s clean. High ceilings. No rats or insects that he can tell. It’s convenient. And it’s six floors up so it’s not like anyone will climb through the busted window, is it?

He moves in on the same day he signs the lease because Nnoitra is sick of living out of his own car – it’s getting way too cold at night to do that, anyway.

He’s climbing the fourth flight of stairs – there’s no elevator, but it’s not like he has much stuff to move – when one of his new neighbours opens his door. A fluffy black cat comes careening down the stairs like a tiny fur missile.

“Shit!” yells the cat’s owner.

Nnoitra is bitterly thinking exactly the same thing: his foot slips off the edge, shoved by the impact of a ballistic cat ramming its tiny vicious body right into his knee.

The next step comes flying toward his chin.

It doesn’t connect.

He jerks to a stop, inexplicably, about three inches from losing a tooth to the step.

Nnoitra flinches at its closeness. He is suspended by a surprisingly slender hand with a vicegrip on his arm. It pulls back, slowly and evenly, righting both Nnoitra and the boxes he’s trying to balance without any apparent strain.

“Um, are you–”

Nnoitra ignores it. He steadies himself on his feet and jerks his arm away from that hand. It loosens immediately and lets him go.

“Sorry, are you–”

Still ignoring.

“FUCKIN’ CAT,” roars Nnoitra, whirling on his heel to follow its path. The cat pauses, fur on end, like it knows he’s talking to it.

It yowls its feline profanity at him from the landing.

Nnoitra takes one threatening step toward it and it bolts, screaming bloody murder.

“The fuck,” mutters Nnoitra, glowering.

“Oh… I thought you were new,” says the voice of the dude who grabbed him. “But I guess you know That Fucking Cat. Are you a friend of Jaegerjaquez?”

“What,” says Nnoitra. He turns, finally.

…The guy who grabbed him is missing an eye. Huh. Nnoitra doesn’t see that often, except in the mirror.

He has blond hair, clear soft-looking skin and white teeth and, not that Nnoitra is checking or anything, but  _yeah_ , those biceps are definitely the reason he could catch and lift a guy like Nnoitra, who’s almost seven feet tall.

He’s nowhere near as tall as Nnoitra, but he has broad shoulders and warm hands and his sleeves are rolled up, completely casually. He's not big, but every solid inch of him is dense with muscle. When he gestures with his hands Nnoitra can see the shift of tendons in his forearms and it makes his mouth go dry. 

M _hm_.

He’s probably a model. Or something.

He’s probably the centrefold of a pirate themed underwear catalogue. Nnoitra would buy it.

He probably walks down the street and people just, like, hurl money at him for letting them look at him.

“Jaegerjaquez’s cat. You know its name so…” there’s a pause. “Oh. You don’t…” He clears his throat and looks away. “Well.”

“…Lucky guess,” Nnoitra says slowly.

“Right. So you… are new? Sixth floor, maybe?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you need help with carrying anything?”

“No,” says Nnoitra, in a hard flat voice that he can’t seem to restrain.

He immediately regrets it. Nnoitra’s first and most natural instinct is to be angry that someone's acting like he can’t do shit on his own – Nnoitra's been on his own for a long damn time and it pisses him off when people act like he’s slow or weak or incapable. Like he might need help. He doesn’t. He won’t. He’ll make sure of it.

But of course the guy doesn’t think he’s fuckin’  _physically incapable_  of hauling seven bags and two boxes of shit up the stairs to his new place. He’s just being friendly or some shit.

Stupidly attractive men are not often friendly to Nnoitra. He should try not to alienate them completely right at the outset.

“Ah, all right,” says the guy easily. He gives Nnoitra an uncertain smile. Right up at him through his eyelashes, which are long and golden. He bites his lip and rocks back a little on his heels and says, “But, er. Do you  _want_  help?”

Nnoitra pauses.

Is… the cute stairwell boy flirting with him?

“What the fuck,” mutters Nnoitra. This  _never_  happens to him. 

The man’s face twists a little: a furrow on his brow, a humiliated flush across his cheekbones.

Noticing the confusion and tentative embarrassment on stairwell boy’s face, Nnoitra stops, replays the last moment and says, much more loudly: “Yes? Yes. Carry – here, don’t look at me like that, fucking, _do not drop that_ – carry this. Number thirteen. Go.”

The expression changes until it’s all – shit, fuck,  _goddamn it_ , this is even worse, it’s all curling lips and big glossy dark eye looking up at him from under those long golden eyelashes  _help_  –

 _FUCKING GET A GRIP, NNOITRA,_ he screams internally, _EVERYBODY LOOKS UP AT YOU LIKE THAT, YOU’RE SEVEN FEET TALL –_  

Nnoitra licks his teeth.

“Great,” the guy says, licking his lower lip, and his tongue is red and his mouth is shiny,  _what the fuck did Nnoitra do to deserve that_ , “I’m number eleven. We share a wall.”

“Fantastic,” says Nnoitra, faintly and flatly. He’s not sure if he means that sarcastically or sincerely.

“I’m Tesla,” says the man, turning away.

“…Nnoitra,” he says, belatedly. He’s not really committed to pleasantries, but Tesla climbs slightly faster than he does, more used to the stairs, and even Nnoitra can accept that if he’s thinking about burying his teeth in a guy’s butt he should probably introduce himself. That’s… gotta be a first name basis kind of thought.

Tesla helps him with three trips up the godforsaken,  _interminable_ stairwell and takes the opportunity to bitch about the previous tenant, who had apparently screamed at his ex wife on the phone at three in the morning every other night and cried loudly when Tesla was trying to sleep.

“– and the one before him was worse. She vacuumed in the dead of the night and used to leave her rubbish bags on the landing until she went out in the morning – bags and bags of cat litter, sitting on the landing– ”

“Mhm,” says Nnoitra, who is just – he’s just so much more interested in the way Tesla’s stupid hides-nothing top is clinging to his biceps.

Tesla wants a neighbour who doesn’t make loud noises after one in the morning, won’t literally set the building alight and doesn’t make anything smell like animal shit. Nnoitra is only half listening, but that seems reasonable.

Kind of suspiciously reasonable, really, because Nnoitra has lived with other human beings before. People are rarely as reasonable as they first appear. Nnoitra would know.

“Is this… all your stuff?” Tesla asks dubiously, finally.

“Yes,” says Nnoitra. He has no control over the defensive note in his voice. Suddenly it doesn’t matter that looking at Tesla makes his whole nervous system buzz. Nnoitra will beat his beautiful fucking face in if he talks shit. At his sides, his fingers flex like claws.

“Huh,” Tesla says, and then wisely elects not to comment on how all Nnoitra’s stuff includes no furniture or crockery or – it’s clothes, two blankets and a box of high-heeled boots. “Well.”

Another pause, this one – considering, but not judgmental. And… there’s Nnoitra’s brain, floating away on an eddy of hormones again. He’s so fucking pathetic. He scowls furiously at the heel of a boot sticking out the maw of one huge striped bag.

“If you need anything,” says Tesla, all melting and earnest, like he might even be sincere, “anything at all, Nnoitra, I’d be happy to help – I’m right next door. Which you know. Because I already… I already said that. Right. Okay. I’ll – um, thank you.”

By the time he finishes processing the way Tesla says ’ _anything at all, Nnoitra_ ’, which elicits its own hazy shiver, Tesla is gone – swallowed up by his own, presumably better furnished, apartment. 

He …just thanked Nnoitra for letting him carry boxes. 

Uh- _huh_. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nnoitra meets some of his other neighbours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote some more? I guess? Same AU, still no plot.

The apartment is fine. 

By fine Nnoitra means cheap. It’s freezing and he can’t afford to run the heat. He has shit all money. He has to work more if he wants more money. Funny how that works. 

Work always picks up in winter, though – long dark nights are ideal for illicit trade, which means Nnoitra gets roughly three emails or calls a day from people whining that someone hasn’t paid up on their debts, hasn’t delivered on their promises, that goods are missing or money promised hasn’t been transferred.

He has to verify that they’re real, obviously, because probably only one in nine actually is and Nnoitra has a reputation for being unbiased. Not  _fair_ , of course, but not  _unfair_  in any particular direction. Nnoitra's work exists in a liminal space between legal and lawless – there are acknowledged rules of trade and exchange, but no legal framework for enforcement. He works with a lot of stressed distributors. He even, technically, has some regulars. 

He meets Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez, who owns the stupid fucking cat that routinely attacks any visitors to the building. He is not really surprised to find that he’s a mouthy twenty-something with dyed hair and torn jeans. 

He runs into him in the stairwell on his third morning.

“Hey, new guy! Nobody’s going to take your bins out if you can’t be bothered doing it yourself,” Jaegerjaquez says pointedly. His voice is loud and his speech is too direct and he sounds like some of the small time gangsters Nnoitra hits for a living. 

Nnoitra’s been here two days, so this isn’t very impactful. “Your cat nearly knocked me over on the stairwell,” he says, by way of response. His voice is raspy and intense, which is pretty much how Nnoitra always sounds. He doesn’t mind it here, because it makes Grimmjow’s eyes narrow.

“Watch where you’re going, then,” Grimmjow suggests, baring his teeth.

Nnoitra smiles back at him. They’re already four floors up and the stairwell spirals dizzyingly below. Grimmjow isn’t balanced well, standing casually in his torn trousers. Nnoitra could pitch him over the edge with very little effort.

Whatever expression comes with his smile must communicate something dire to Grimmjow, because his face does a complicated thing and he leaves without saying anything more.

Nnoitra makes a particular point of kicking his cat. 

Annoyingly, the dumb shit just yowls at the top of its tiny lungs and puts more scratches in Nnoitra’s leather boot in an effort to climb all the way to his face, which it presumably wants to shred. Then, when he shakes it off and sends it tumbling down the stairs, it screams at him again and bolts unsteadily out the door with all its fur on end. 

The cat’s probably perfect for Grimmjow, actually. 

Nnoitra settles over the next few days, at least a little. He meets a bunch of his neighbours, mostly by accident. He doesn’t see the cute blond from the stairwell again, but he hears him sometimes. They’re neighbours, right next to one another, so he can tell when he’s getting up early on weekdays, can hear him running water that makes the pipes whine at six in the morning. 

Showering, Nnoitra thinks, even as he sits alone and regards the bags that contain all his worldly goods. Nnoitra desperately needs to go shopping for… basically everything. He avoids it by thinking about other things instead. 

Like, the cute blond guy probably looks real good wet and naked, too. 

Nnoitra doesn’t mind thinking of that in the privacy of his own thoughts. The idea of Tesla damp and vulnerable, with steam rising from his bare flushed skin is a good one, and it makes him feel, however briefly, warm down to his toes.

He takes a contract and spends the first half of Friday night prowling the industrial district, after which he winds up waiting for his target to get home. When she comes home from clubbing – the mainstay, Nnoitra has discovered, of her extremely boring social life – he’s waiting for her with his boots propped on the kitchen table, with his single eye glinting in the light from the street. 

“Good morning, pet,” he says, smiling widely.

She must be a clever girl, because she screams before her key even clears the lock.

He laughs and gets up to go to work.

It never ends well when it starts like that, with Nnoitra waiting for someone in the dark. 

He comes back to the apartment complex – not home, not yet, because he still doesn’t feel like it’s that, not when all the sounds are strange and the walls are yet pale and cold and unwelcoming – tired and gritty-eyed, at five thirty in the morning. His knuckles are scraped raw and his knee gives a twinge on every stair because the stupid bitch tried to jam her stiletto heel right through the joint. 

The steps up are long and they feel interminable. Nnoitra kind of wants a shower, but his water pressure’s shit and he knows already that there’s a better chance of the water staying hot if he tries it during daylight. At least his bed – a cheap futon whose primary advantage is that he can disassemble the whole thing and jam it in the back of his car at a moment’s notice – is made up and waiting for him.

He unlocks the door on the second try, kicks it shut behind him with one heel and slings his keys over the lopsided coat hook on the back. The bed is his only furniture so far and he isn’t feeling that enthused about shopping.  

His heels clatter loudly on the hard floor so he kicks his boots off. There’s a spot of blood on one toe, dried, and he scratches it off while he sits slumped on his bed in the empty space. It flakes off easily. 

He needs more blankets, he thinks. He can’t be bothered getting up and actually crawling beneath the blanket, so he just flips one edge over his eyes. It’s dark underneath. Dark, and quiet. 

His knee aches and his knuckles throb. Nnoitra closes his eye.

He can smell it when his neighbour gets up, because he cooks something hot with eggs and onions. The smell of it unfurls warmly in Nnoitra’s belly. 

Great, the cute stairwell boy can cook, too. It’s a sour thought. Nnoitra thinks about investing in a frying pan and feels exhausted. 

He falls asleep to the soft clatter of dishes and the creak of the floors next door.

Grimmjow’s not even the most annoying person in the building, it turns out. Nnoitra is biased because he hates people without reservation and nearly without exception, but he thinks the girl from the apartment three doors away is even worse than Grimmjow. She shows up with biscuits at ten o'clock, which is only an hour or so after he’s gotten to sleep. 

He answers his door looking, he is sure, like the wrath of god. And not a loving god, either. 

“The fuckin’ building had better be on fire,” he growls, leaning his shoulder heavily against the door frame.

The building is not on fire. 

The biscuits look questionable.

And the girl behind them has to be all of maybe eighteen, with huge eyes and an earnest expression and tits that must precede her to every conversation by like at least three seconds. Nnoitra sneers. He bets she’s popular. Or she thinks she is, anyway.

Her smile doesn’t falter. “I heard you recently moved in,” she says, and her eyes are like headlights firing blinding beams of pure oblivious sincerity right into his face. She doesn’t even flinch at his missing… oh, right. He fell asleep wearing the patch. “I’m Inoue Orihime, it’s very good to meet you.”

Her reflexive bow nearly sends the whole plate of biscuits tumbling. One of them makes a wild bid for freedom off the edge of the plate. 

He doesn’t think about it before he snatches it out of the air. 

“Oh wow. You must have great reflexes!”

Nnoitra grunts, still staring at her. He turns the biscuit over in his hand. It has kernels of corn in it, like bright bits of gold flashing in the dark-baked dough. It smells like chocolate. That’s… weird as fuck.

“But… Is your hand okay?”

“Yep,” he says blankly, without even looking at it. Nnoitra always has scraped and bruised knuckles. That’s what you get when you hit people for a living. She’s still standing there, hovering awkwardly with her biscuits. Fuck. Is she hoping he’ll do something for her? He’s tempted to tell her he won’t beat up her ex boyfriend for free no matter what she looks like or how hard she cries – she seems like the type to have a sob story like that – but with tits like that she must have options other than her new neighbour. Probably has idiots lining up around the block to pick fights on her behalf.

“What do you want?” he barks.

“Oh, uh, I live in apartment eighteen –”

“I know where you live." 

He looks at her. 

She looks back. The obliviousness is fading, shading itself back to something between unsettled and hurt.

"Erm,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… mean to interrupt. I just wanted to introduce myself. If you have any problems…”

She trails off weakly, having finally correctly assessed his level of engagement in this conversation. 

It’s clearly making her nervous, so Nnoitra does nothing to help the situation. He just stares at her. Then, finally, he smiles widely, all teeth, and prompts: “Yeah?" 

"Ah! Um. Never. Never mind?" 

She bows again, anxiously, and he sees the biscuits about to take a dive off the plate. He does nothing to stop it because he knows he’ll get a kick out of seeing her make an idiot of herself. It might make up for her having woken him.

A deathly pale hand comes out of absolutely fucking nowhere that Nnoitra's sleepy eye can see. It tilts the plate so it’s horizontal and nothing goes flying.

The girl makes a squeak that makes Nnoitra twitch.

"Ulquiorra?” she says, and turns to him.

He’s… short. Not “short compared to Nnoitra” or “short for a man”, but just short for a regular human being. Nnoitra could rest his elbow on the man’s head. He’s short and he has dead white skin – which is not makeup, unless he’s dedicated enough to paint his hands before ten on a weekend – and eyes the kind of bright green colour that Nnoitra associates with animals that are poisonous to eat.

“You forgot your mail,” he says flatly to the girl.

“What,” she says. 

He holds up a pile of letters in his other hand. “Your mail.”

“My…” She hesitates, like she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “Mail?”

“It was overflowing,” he says, in the same dull and unaffected voice. “Grimmjow threatened to set it on fire.”

Yeah, Nnoitra bets he did. He’s met Grimmjow a grand total of once and already that seems perfectly in character.

“Oh,” says Orihime. Then, because she is obviously relentlessly polite and not capable of accepting the easy out offered to her by this interruption, “I was just… because he’s new…”

Ulquiorra looks at Nnoitra.

Nnoitra gives him his biggest and most unsettling smile. Unlike Grimmjow, Ulquiorra is not moved in the slightest.

“Did you make those,” he says, and it takes Nnoitra a second to realise that Ulquiorra is talking to the girl, and also that he is asking a question despite the inflection.

“Yes! Would you like to try one?”

“No,” says Ulquiorra flatly. 

“Oh.”

“We’ll leave now,” he says, and this time Nnoitra is very sure he’s being addressed. Ulquiorra’s eyes are flat and give absolutely no indication of what he’s thinking.

“We will?” Orihime says. 

Ulquiorra takes her by the arm and pulls her inexorably away from Nnoitra’s door. “Yes.”

“Nice to meet you!” Orihime calls over her shoulder, letting herself be pulled away.

Nnoitra closes the door without responding, stomps back to bed and, after a second, shoves the biscuit in his mouth. 

Which is how he discovers it’s flavoured with chocolate, sweet corn and  _wasabi_.

Nnoitra coughs. What the fuck?

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another fic I really hope to continue at some point? I have so many of them. But for now we'll call it complete because there's no guarantee that further fic will be forthcoming. :)
> 
> If there was something you particularly liked about this fic, let me know in a comment. If you're inclined to comment. Otherwise have a good night.


End file.
